Salt
by merae2888
Summary: Yet another reunion story for Bellamy and Clarke! "The cure for anything is saltwater: sweat, tears, or the sea." -Isak Dinesen


Disclaimer: I don't own _The 100._

 **Salt**

"The cure for anything is saltwater: sweat, tears, or the sea."

-Isak Dinesen

 _Sweat_

Clarke walks.

She finds a shovel at their old camp. She doesn't linger, the destroyed remains of what she built with Bellamy too difficult to contemplate. She almost laughs as a stinging nostalgia for the early days swells within her, when Bellamy wanting to chop off her hand to get that fucking wristband and Jasper getting stabbed through the chest with a goddamn javelin were her biggest problems.

She walks away and doesn't look back.

The mountain is close, will forever be too close, and she manages to reach it before night settles. She curls up against the trunk of a massive oak and stares at the stars through the tree branches, waiting for sleep.

It comes with blood-tinged ghosts and unending screams that sing of her damnation. Her eyes wrench open and she gasps, clutching at her racing heart, keeping her gaze on the heavens, wondering if Bellamy's forgiveness is enough to send her there instead of hell.

Then she thinks about Finn's blood dripping from her fingertips and Charlotte's tiny body flying over the cliff and wonders if there is a heaven at all.

She rises with the sun, lets it spur her on even as her exhausted mind and body quake with exhaustion.

She digs, thinking it might be easier to create a grave without the corpse laying next to her but there's nothing easy about returning the dead to the earth. It's hot and sweat drips down her arms into her hands and makes her grip falter on the shovel.

She carries out the little boy first; the one Bellamy had knelt over and closed his eyes forever. He'd whispered his name through a wretched sob and Clarke carves 'Lovejoy' into a piece of wood, chokes down a disturbed laugh at the harsh irony of laying love and joy to rest eternally in the cold, damp dirt, and places it over the head of the grave. She draws him a dream and sticks it beneath his name.

Maya is next. Clarke finds some yellow flowers, they might be weeds, and places them in her stiff, dry hands. She thinks of Jasper and Monty and the broken trust that might never heal between them. Clarke pulls Maya's hair from the open wounds on her face. There's a tear track running from her temple to her chin and she's sure it must be Jasper's. She swallows down the bile that rises to her throat.

Logically, she knows that she can't bury them all. There's too many. But she does. She huffs and she digs and she sweats and she came here for some sort of cleansing redemption but every new stilled body she drags from the mountain just settles on her heart until she can't breathe and she wants to crawl in with them all. The days pass in a hazy blur of death and heat and sweat. She closes her eyes each night and tries to think of anything that will make her want to open them again.

When the last grave is finished, she starts moving, east, toward the sea.

 _Tears_

Bellamy chops.

They need wood to build houses and a fence and a City Hall and he has ideas but even though they call him a hero, the adults don't actually listen to him so he volunteers to come out to the forest everyday and chop down trees.

He chops and he plans.

The methodical motion of swinging an axe over his shoulder allows his mind to wander. He's thankful, some days, that there's time to think about how he's going to escape.

But that always leads to him thinking about the fucking mountain, with it's steel cages and stark white holding cells and he wonders if there will ever be a day that he doesn't want to escape from his life.

Some days, he wishes he had nothing to think about at all.

The handle slips in his sweaty palms and he almost cuts his damn leg off. He curses the blazing sun and the way it makes everything look golden, like _her_ and he just drops the axe altogether because the only thing that's keeping him here is the rapidly dimming hope that one day Clarke will walk through the gates and into his arms.

Everyone in the camp is pairing off: Octavia and Lincoln, Raven and Wick, Monty and Miller. He's left with Jasper, which wouldn't be so bad if he didn't assign his ever-present bitterness directly to Clarke. The one person Bellamy wants to see the most is the same one that killed Jasper's first love. So yeah, they don't talk much.

He's truly alone now and it stings as badly as the days after his mother was floated and Octavia was locked up, knowing he brought it on himself.

He's even starting to miss Murphy.

He pulls his hand across his face, tries to convince himself that the stinging wetness in his eyes is just more sweat but it doesn't really work.

 _You should've tried harder._

The voice in his head belongs to no one in particular; it's more a mixed chorus of everyone he's ever disappointed.

But he didn't _know_ , at least he wasn't positive that those blue eyes held most of his heart, or that her voice was his favorite sound, or that the absence of her would be worse than any torture he'd endured.

 _You don't know what you have until it's gone or some shit._

And that's pretty fucking pathetic because he never really had her at all.

He sinks to the ground and lets himself cry until his whole body shakes, until every piece of him hurts. He wants to hate her so badly he dredges up all those early memories when she was the most irritating creature and he was ready to drop her to her death in the Grounder trap.

But they don't work. He dry heaves, his body rejecting the very idea of doing anything but loving her.

###

He goes to Mount Weather, Octavia and Lincoln trailing behind, to keep an eye on him. The nightmares have been bad, waking him almost hourly and he's not thinking clearly. So when he announces that he's returning to the scene that houses most of his nightmares, his sister picks up her pack without hesitation. "You're not going alone." He could laugh, their roles in each other's lives entirely reversed.

The graves are crude and many. They step around them carefully until Bellamy stops suddenly by one impossibly small mound. His fingers tremble as he reaches out to a small piece of wood that bears the name 'Lovejoy.' He didn't tell anyone but her about it.

Octavia has tears in her eyes when she turns to him. "Do you think-"

"Clarke." It should be harder to say her name, the one syllable he's avoided speaking aloud since the day she walked away from him. But it's a relief, it transforms into a prayer on his tongue. To see all her handiwork, to know that at some point, not long ago, she was standing here, maybe in the exact spot his body now occupied, gives him a renewed purpose.

There's a weathered slip of paper tucked beneath Lovejoy's marker and Bellamy unfolds a vision of another world, where mermaids flirt with pirates and sea nymphs play with dolphins.

And above them all, Poseidon watches, the mighty leader, the forceful god.

By Clarke's hand, he looks a hell of a lot like Bellamy.

Maybe she didn't run away, he thinks. Maybe she was forging a path clear enough for him to follow.

 _The Sea_

There might not be mermaids jumping from the waves to greet her, but there is magic here.

Sunlight decorates the crystalline water with bright diamonds. It's glass, smooth and controlled but there are storms lying in its depths. She has been gazing at the grand expanse of the ocean for just a few moments but she can already sense the unpredictability within the swells. At any moment, they could rise up and sharpen, turn dangerous with a gust of wind. The sea is an unending story, a maddening mystery.

"It's Bellamy," she whispers to no one.

###

Bellamy leads them through the woods, more than he had expected following him, trusting him.

"You don't know where she is," Raven whispers for the millionth time.

He thinks of the drawing in his inner jacket pocket. It rests against his chest, protecting his heart. "I'll find her."

She rolls her eyes, says nothing for a second as they continue to trudge. Then, quietly, "I didn't think you'd forgive her so easily."

He smiles with a secret: no one understands them like they understand each other. For Raven, he only shrugs. "It's what we do."

He hears it before he sees it, the distant rumblings of crashing water, the wind coming harsher through the upper branches. The group grows restless as the trees start to thin. Every step comes with more salt on the air. Bellamy speeds up too, can't seem to help it.

And she's there, staring at the gap in the trees that he emerges through. He stops for a moment, has to convince himself it isn't a dream when she smiles at him and waves, like she'd been expecting him for awhile. Their eyes don't stray as they struggle toward each other, nor when Raven throws her arms around Clarke, nor when the others run past him and onto the sand, dropping their bags and shrugging off their heavy jackets. They splash into the water and turn back into children.

He hauls her into him, buries his face in her hair. "Hi," he says with a bizarre little laugh.

She giggles and then does that delightful little nuzzle thing against his shoulder. He can feel her smile curve on his neck.

"I knew you'd find me," she whispers, her faith sinking under his skin and into his heart.

He pulls away, hands her the picture. "There's just one problem."

She unfolds it and frowns, her mouth somehow turning down more as her forehead scrunches.

"You forgot Amphitrite." Then he kisses that frown away.

 **Author's Note: I don't know what this is but I kind of like how it turned out. This is the first thing in** _ **The 100**_ **fandom I've ever posted and I'm pretty sure it's terrible but if you enjoyed it at all, please let me know!**

 **Amphitrite is the name of Poseidon's wife.**


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